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Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewel announces the preliminary version of the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP) near the Palm Springs windmills, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2014. The plan released Tuesday recommends designating a total of 2 million acres as appropriate sites for future solar, wind and geothermal projects. Another 4.9 million acres under the U.S. Bureau of Land Management would be set aside as conservation areas, if the draft plan is adopted. (AP Photo/The Desert Sun, Jay Calderon)

Google’s announcement Tuesday that it will soon power its offices and data centers with 100 percent renewable energy received applause from green-power experts, but was slammed by a group led by a member of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team.

The Mountain View tech giant said it expects to achieve that green-energy goal by the end of 2017.

“Today, we are the world’s largest corporate buyer of renewable power … bigger than many large utilities,” Google senior vice president of technical infrastructure Urs Hölzle said in an online announcement.

Google’s dedication towind and solar power shows “there is a strong private-sector commitment to these technologies” and it “speaks to the cost-competitiveness of these technologies,” said Ethan Elkind, director of the climate program at the UC Berkeley law school.

Hölzle said Google has made its data centers 50 percent more energy-efficient than the industry average, “but we still need a lot of energy to process trillions of Google searches every year, play more than 400 hours of YouTube videos uploaded every minute, and power the products and services that our users depend on.”

Google’s renewable-energy purchase agreements will lead to total investment in green energy of $3.5 billion globally, with about $2.3 billion of that in the U.S., Hölzle said.

The explosion of cloud computing, with its need for massive data storage, and the growth in internet traffic have helped make data centers one of the fastest-growing energy consumers in the developed world, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. In 2013, data centers in the U.S. used power equivalent to the annual output of 34 big coal-powered power plants, according to the organization.

There remains the problem of “wheeling,” which occurs when one company, for example, goes fully green-powered, consuming the available renewables, while another firm, which may have been using some proportion of green power, then goes to full “brown” power from non-renewable sources. That results in no net reduction in non-renewables, Kammen said. That issue can be addressed by government mandates increasing supplies of renewable energy, he said.

“We need the market rules to catch up to what Google is doing,” Kammen said.

Elkind also noted that Google can’t get 100 percent green power for all of its locations at all times — wind and solar power are dependent on weather. It has to buy some conventionally produced power off the grid, which means it does actually use power from coal, natural gas and nuclear plants. The firm offsets that use with surplus renewable energy generated by the projects it’s invested in.

Given that offsetting, it’s “misleading” for Google to claim 100 percent renewables use, said Chris Warren, spokesman for a think tank funded largely by people and companies in the fossil fuel industry, and led by Thomas Pyle, just tapped for Trump’s transition team on energy.

“What Google is doing is green window dressing,” said Warren, of the Institute for Energy Research. “It’s a PR stunt, claiming 100 percent renewables when that’s not actually the case.

“You can’t pick and choose what source you’re getting your electricity from when you’re connected to the grid. The way they’re presenting it is misleading.”

Whether this view from a think tank now closely tied to the president-elect foreshadows a rocky road ahead for the technology industry under Trump remains to be seen, but his selection of advisers doesn’t suggest an affinity for the sector, said Peter Csathy, a tech industry consultant and chairman of CREATV Media.

“We have no idea what to expect from the Trump administration,” Csathy said. “If you look at his list of appointees, I don’t think anybody stands out as being a leader or friend of the tech industry. That alone speaks volumes.”

Ethan Baron is a business reporter at The Mercury News, and a native of Silicon Valley before it was Silicon Valley. Baron has worked as a reporter, columnist, editor and photographer in newspapers and magazines for 25 years, covering business, politics, social issues, crime, the environment, outdoor sports, war and humanitarian crises.